This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
With the cost of healthcare skyrocketing, the medical profession has increasingly come to recognize the importance of preventative medicine. Thus, throughout the country, professionally-staffed behavioral modification clinics are growing in number. In addition, some employers are also hosting at-work programs to help their employees make beneficial behavioral modifications to their lives: stop smoking, lose weight, exercise regularly, and the like. Supplementing these professionally led clinics and at-work seminars, a number of doctors and health and fitness educators have written books that are designed to teach the fundamentals of self-improvement through behavioral change.
Unfortunately, while these are all laudatory efforts, human nature seems quite resistant to change. The New York Times in a feature article “Pumping Up the Self-Control in the Age of Temptations” published Oct. 8, 2010, reported that some believe a person has only a limited supply of willpower and recommend using it wisely.
Indeed, it is human nature to lapse into old habits shortly after each New Year's resolution. Thus behavioral educators and counselors offering one-on-one guidance play a very important role. Professional educators and counselors can actively monitor their client's progress, offering encouragement when needed, while guiding the client along a new path that, with practice, replaces old habits leaving the client or consumer with a healthier lifestyle.
The problem is, behavioral educators and counselors are in short supply. To leverage the most talented educators some have proposed that Internet-based websites could be used to provide written teaching materials and video training sessions that can be watched online. While such websites work reasonably well at disseminating basic information, they generally fail as behavioral modification tools, again because of human nature and the complexity of the issues that surround it. It seems these web-based resources are no substitute for the encouragement and monitoring and basic nurturing that can be provided by professional educators and counselors in a one-on-one relationship with their clients.